AMD Radeon R9 380X may beat GTX 980 in February 2015

NVIDIA's Maxwell dealt a severe blow to AMD's high-end graphics card lineup and it seems the company won't have any new cards to respond to NVIDIA's GTX 900 series until February 2015.

According to rumor website WCCF Tech, AMD will pit the Radeon R9 380X against the GeForce GTX 980 and not the flagship Radeon R9 390X as was previously thought.

AMD reportedly has three cards in the works: the Treasure Island based Radeon R9 370X, the Fiji based Radeon R9 380X and the Bermuda based Radeon R9 390X. This new Pirate Island GPU lineup from AMD is expected to be made on TSMC's 20nm process and will introduce 3D staked HBM memory.

If the information from overclockers.ru checks out then we should see the R9 390X go head to head with Nvidia’s yet unreleased GTX 980 Ti/Titan 2 based on the GM200 GPU. While the R9 380X should be positioned to go against the GTX 980 and 970. And finally the R9 370X against the GTX 960.

AMD also revealed in the same event in Japan that all the new functionality in Tonga (a la R9 285) will make their way into the company’s next generation of APUs. This includes all the new improvements to the tessellation engine. The new lossless color compression algorithm which improves bandwidth by 40%. The updated video decoder along with the performance/watt improvements.

The Radeon R9 390X is expected to feature a form of AMD's hybrid Hydra liquid cooling system currently used by the R9 295X2 dual-GPU card.